Prophets of the Ghost Ants

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  With the sounding of thorn trumpets, the crowd untied their bundles to reveal sacks of colored powders. Anand looked in curiosity as Dwan cupped purple powder, held his hand flat, and then blew it into Anand’s face. He gasped, sneezed, and then realized the powder was an edible candy. All around him, people were hurling, blowing, and sprinkling powder on each other. Decorum had blown away in a breeze as the Dranverites ran onto the arena, their skin and clothing changing hues as they tossed powder and danced on the crushed idols.

  Anand was shaking as he climbed to the back of the stadium to look down on the destroyers of gods. In the distance, he saw other stadiums where the same rituals were in progress. Did these people kill their gods to let demons rule? he asked himself. Then he realized that couldn’t be true, since demons like Scorpion, Flea, and Night Wasp had been destroyed in the arena, too.

  The revels continued. Belja and Hopkut had joined the crowd and were dancing on the rubble of Madricanth! They were signaling Anand to join them when the celebrants poured out of the stadium and into the streets to hurl their powders, changing their colors again and again. Dwan grabbed Anand by his arm to bring him to the streets to continue the powder battles.

  Anand looked to the clear sky, and realized that he was still quite safe—and completely unsure of what this bizarre festival commemorated. What he was sure of, though, was that someday—when the Dranverites allowed him—he would make a glorious return to Cajoria on the back of a flying locust trailing colored mists. He smiled at that vision only to be plunged into deep apprehensions.

  Will the Dranverites let me leave? Will I ever see Daveena again? Has her father promised her to someone else?

  Has she forgotten me?

  CHAPTER 25

  A BAWDY SPECTACLE

  Daveena could never forget Anand. She breathed him in with every breath and, in endless prayers, beseeched Madricanth to hasten his return. She had heard he was forever lost in some distant country and was seen as a traitor by the Cajorites. In her heart, she knew he was establishing relations with a new trading partner, but her parents were not so sure.

  “Daughter, you must savor the journey you are on now, not dwell on the one behind,” said Gupa, knowing why Daveena looked out their sled’s window so intently on the route to Palzhad.

  “I am, Mother. It is a good, bright journey.”

  But journeys were less appealing to Daveena since her status as the betrothed of a spanner had vanished. She still felt the sting from the night before, when she had been shooed from the platter of the betrothed girls and boys.

  “You are good with languages,” said Eltzer, her father, looking over his shoulder as he prodded their roach forward. “And you can see into people, figure out what they want to hear. You should apprentice with your Cousin Silka and learn the fortune-telling trade.”

  “Yes,” said her mother. “Fortune-telling is a good way to meet an outsider looking for a bride. Their mothers will come to you looking for hope and you can offer yourself to a boy you might fancy. You could give birth to a spanner, Daveena. What glory that would be for you.”

  “I already have a spanner,” she said. “We have seen our destiny.”

  Her parents sighed as she returned to the window and saw builders from all over the Slope that had been assigned to the outland of Palzhad. She had heard its people had been killed or abducted by some mysterious ghost tribe and its mound was being renovated for the returned pioneers of Cajoria. Near the borders of the Dustlands, workers were rebuilding the border walls of pebbles and ant droppings or renovating the neglected warning and observation towers. Lush weeds on the mound’s perimeter were being sawed and mulched or uprooted.

  “Time to dance,” said her mother when Zedral, the chieftain, blew his thorn trumpet at the head of the caravan. Sighing, Daveena stood up, and mother and daughter donned dark shrouds and stepped to the back of the sand-sled as they neared the camps of the laborers. At the back of the clan’s parading sleds, the mothers beat drums as their daughters danced in black sacks that obscured all but their eyes. The builders and their overseers, crushed with boredom and fatigue, looked from their labors to the dancing women at the back of the glittering sleds. Daveena could see the men’s eyes fill with wonderment as they pondered what gorgeous mysteries shimmied inside the dark cloth.

  When the Plep clan reached a quieter area near the border with the Dustlands, they made camp and disassembled the repaired wall to bring their sleds into a thicket of virgin weeds. During the day, the men busied themselves with hunting and gathering in the game-rich wilds feared by Slopeites. In the camp, Daveena and the women beautified each other, for later it would be their work to gather the treasures of the sedites. In the land of the starving Slopeites, Daveena and other girls of girth would be put forth as the main attraction that night. That day she did not gossip or sing with the thin girls as they went to work on her. “What’s made you so sad?” asked the pink-haired Eturra as she mercilessly plucked at Daveena’s underarm hair. “You’ll feel better for sharing,” she said, openly smirking as she petted the braid that marked her as spoken for.

  “You know what’s made me sad,” Daveena said. “And it’s sad that you find such joy in it.”

  As ever, a slight wind blew from the north, but in a circling current, Daveena caught a vague scent of something acrid from the south. She heard the roaches bucking left and right in their pens on a sand clearing. The chieftain’s tallest and eldest son, Bejetz, walked towards the women with his father’s orders. “Wandering women, my father believes it is best to leave here before tomorrow’s sunrise,” he said. “The roaches know something.”

  After a Britasyte caravan approached a Slopeish mound, their first business was trading roach eggs for the Holy Mildew in secrecy. The priests went out to meet the roach people in the weeds, ostensibly to counter their pollution with rituals. In reality, they transacted crucial and necessary business. They knew the Britasytes used the mildew to contact their two-sexed demon, but such was the price the priests paid to maintain their own powers. On their return to the mound, they warned the people to “stay away from the impure visitors,” which always worked as more of an advertisement than a true stricture. Men of all but the lowest stations left during the night in simple disguises to indulge in the roach people’s carnival and its spectacles of dancing women with their dark, forbidden beauty.

  That night, it was a larger crowd than the Britasytes had expected. Among the laborers were reinforcements from the border patrol who had tethered their ants and abandoned their posts. Shrouded women wandered through the crowd and passed out leaf-cones of free aphid liquor. The punch, colored a bright pink with hymen fruit, was something the women never drank themselves—for good reason. Those who did drank it would pay for it later.

  Several group dances were performed first in the shrouds, and then in a variety of outlandish costumes that incorporated wings of moths and butterflies. The dancers’ faces were obscured with masks of demons and gods from foreign lands. Later, they switched to translucent veils.

  The roach-men played music described as “demonic” by the Slopeites with a variety of drums, scrapers, and singing as they swayed to their rhythms below the platform. As the performance continued, the dancers shed more clothing and, eventually, the veils. For the final number, a hollow statue of Madricanth was floated onto the stage. The idol opened to release almost naked dancers, their skins coated in the glowing lymph of lightning flies.

  Released from their cycle of dread and monotony, the Slopeites were caught up in a frenzy of indulgence. Each woman on the stage seemed especially beautiful, and the musicians—intoxicated with a potion of cannabis—lifted the crowd above the Sand with their playing. Aches and pains, worries and troubles, all parted, it seemed, forever.

  The last of the Slopeites’ money was taken from them to enter the tents. Here, in the darkness, they spilled their seeds around platforms where the Britasyte beauties rested above them, bathed in the light of glowworms. Overcome,
some men even took this chance to indulge in behaviors forbidden between men. When it was all over, most were too drunk to return to camp. They crawled into weeds to sleep on their leaves or made beds of blades of grass.

  Tired but contented, the Britasyte men gathered in a clearing of the circled sleds to count the take under weakening torches. After dividing it, they trudged off to their mattresses. The clan was so fatigued they did not have trouble sleeping even though the summer cicadas screeched by the thousands in the dying trees. Some of the clan stuffed their ears with wax plugs.

  None of them heard the clicking of the roaches or their antennae whipping the air.

  When some roaches rammed their pens and snapped a plank, though, Bejetz woke and shouted a chain of warnings through the sand-sleds between sharp blasts of his thorn trumpet.

  “We’re leaving! Now! Something’s coming!” Bejetz shouted.

  But something was already there. Like a great moving wall, thousands of spectral foot soldiers pushed out of the weeds from the south. Each soldier was poised with a bow and arrow, all aimed at the Britasytes popping from their sleds.

  Zedral and his wives looked out to see Hulkrites, the rumored ghost warriors. Their ants had been left behind, as not even ghost ants would come near roaches. It made little difference as a multitude of Hulkrites without their insects seemed no less threatening. At the army’s head was Tahn, shouting his commands from a gilded throne carried on the shoulders of his men. Zedral knew what he must do and shouted hasty orders to his clan.

  The men went to the stores of treasure in their sand-sleds. The women and children stripped to their maggot disguises before they went into hiding. They slipped through trap doors and crawled to the roach pen where they wormed under the largest roaches, then nestled within their belly scales.

  As Daveena and the other women waited in darkness, Zedral led his men to the Hulkrites’ leader. Each Britasyte male carried a barrel of treasures. They were silent except for a fearful shaking that made rattles of the barrels’ contents. Zedral bowed to Tahn and greeted him in Slopeish.

  “Mighty Stranger, you command a great army. Please, take all our treasures and leave us our lives.”

  “It is your lives I am interested in,” said Tahn through his interpreter, a noseless man with a low Cajorite accent. “Your lives and those of your roaches.”

  “Our roaches are our livelihood. Without them we would suffer and die.”

  “You are already suffering. You live in darkness and worship a demon. The Britasytes will remember this day as a happy and holy one: the day they were brought into the grace of Hulkro.”

  “We had heard you are ghosts.”

  “We are obviously not. Do you wish to be?”

  Zedral shuddered. In the distance he heard the rustle of a swarm of ants tied to weeds.

  “Mighty commander, we honor all gods of the people we trade with. We will worship your god, too.”

  Zedral could see that this statement infuriated Tahn, who shouted his response. Pleckoo shouted in turn.

  “No! You will not defile Hulkro by including him in an altar of your demons. You will worship Hulkro alone.”

  The Britasytes had been in this position before, but not facing so many soldiers. Zedral prayed to Madricanth to bless him with guile.

  “We surrender to your ways,” Zedral said and bowed. “Hulkro is mighty to inspire such a great army.”

  Tahn sneered and spat out his words. “Your words are as false as your god,” said the translator. “But we will make honest and happy converts of all of you. Where are your women?”

  “Our women? They have moved onto Mound Bothomp where . . .”

  Tahn did not listen to the complete translation.

  “You would not allow your women to travel alone,” Pleckoo interpreted. Tahn’s next instructions were not translated at all. More Hulkrites arrived, lugging massive containers of woven twigs on sand-sleds which they pulled to the clearing between Tahn and the Britasytes.

  “Tahn the Prophet demands that you herd your roaches into these containers. You will follow them inside.”

  Zedral was astonished. Roaches repulsed everyone but Britasytes. What do these ghost soldiers want with them?

  “If you do not comply, you may meet your deaths now.”

  Zedral feigned fainting and fell to his knees. Bejetz caught his father and righted him. Zedral stammered as he concocted a plan and whispered to the men in Britasyte.

  “Lead the roaches into their cages,” he said, “but allow those with women and children hiding under them to escape. It must look like an accident. Shout after them.”

  The men went to the pen and untethered the roaches as gates of the twig boxes were raised. A roach hiding women and their children was allowed to race off. Tahn watched and was furious.

  “You let that one go!” Pleckoo shouted.

  “We . . . we do not have complete control of them,” Zedral shouted back.

  Tahn gave a command to the archers behind him. They took aim and their arrows found targets in Bejetz’s face. His head splattered like a crushed berry. Zedral fell over his son’s body and wept.

  “All roaches and all your people are to enter the cages,” shouted Pleckoo.

  Zedral gave orders through his tears, and roaches and Britasytes entered the boxes. Once inside, the women and children emerged.

  “The Prophet is as merciful as Hulkro,” said Pleckoo to Zedral, the last to enter a box. “But Tahn informs you that the next time you lie to him, you will be slain and your body fed to our ants.”

  The twig container was dark and windowless and the people and roaches inside it shuffled in confusion. The Britasytes heard the hard scrape of sand as they were dragged off toward Hulkren, a place beyond the Dustlands. It was a place they had never desired to wander.

  CHAPTER 26

  A MISSION FOR THE CAJORITE

  One morning in the library of the sand and lacquer palace, Anand wandered about as the linguists debated a translation. The Slopeites’ word for butterfly was the combinant “floating-flower,” but their word for moth appeared to be “folding-flying-flower.” While they attempted a clarification, Anand spotted a series of scrolls whose labels read The Britasyte Tongue. Excited, he unrolled the pages and found he could read them.

  “Who speaks Britasyte?” he asked. The linguists looked delighted. A short time later, a man of forty-six summers was brought to the temple. Though his skin was covered in lavender paint, his physiognomy was familiar. Anand rose and greeted him in the Britasyte fashion.

  “I am Anand, a Britasyte wanderer, son of the Entreveans.”

  “Good travels. Pizhyot of the Pafentu,” he said smiling sadly. “I was a man-child the last time I heard another Britasyte speak my first tongue.”

  Anand was surprised and distressed. The disappearance of the fourth clan of Britasytes had been a mystery for years.

  “How long have you lived here?” Anand asked.

  “Since my twelfth summer.”

  “When were you captured?”

  “I was rescued.”

  “Rescued?”

  “Our caravan was raided by renegades of the Zulzict mound of the Seed Eater people. They killed our roaches and then my clan. I was saved at the last moment by Dranverish defenders.”

  “Why haven’t you returned? There are other roach clans.”

  “I did not want to. I was grateful to these people and taught them the Britasyte ways and language. I was ready to return when I fell in love with my interpreter. We have two daughters.”

  Pizhyot wore amber amulets about his neck which he held up. Carved upon them were portraits of his wife and daughters. Anand was marveling at the craftsmanship when he realized the linguists had been following the conversation. One of them, a woman with a tower of hair in sunset hues, addressed them in Britasyte. “Our tasks will go very quickly now. Pizhyot, will you join us in our efforts to document the language of the Slopeites?”

  “It is my duty to peace,” he
said and bowed.

  “To peace?” Anand asked.

  “To peace. On its edges, our great nations . . .”

  “Nations?” Anand asked, emphasizing the plural.

  “Yes. Our Dranverite nations border more than a thousand others.”

  “You exaggerate. A thousand other nations?”

  “More than a hundred nations inhabit the treetops alone.”

  “What do these people want from me?” he asked Pizhyot. “Are they learning the Slopeites’ language before they conquer them? Will they kill me when they are done with me?”

  “Killing a human is forbidden in Dranveria. It is only done in self-defense and as a last resort. Were any of the Slopeish invaders killed when they violated our borders?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I assure you they were not. You could be our emissary, Anand, like a spanner. One day, should you choose, you will return to Cajoria with a gospel for both the slaves and masters of the queendoms of the Slope.”

  “The slaves and masters?” Anand blinked in confusion. “Define this word, ‘slave.’”

  “I will Anand-shmi, it means . . .”

  “What does this suffix ‘shmi’ mean?” Anand interrupted.

  “Beloved citizen,” said Pizhyot. “A member of a nation.”

  “Like a subject,” Anand said.

  “No, Anand-shmi. There are no subjects in Dranveria, for no man or woman here subjects himself to any other.”

  “Who is the ruler here?”

  “We all rule. We choose our leaders.”

  Anand was very suspicious of that notion. What if the Slopeites, as stupid as they were, had the chance to choose their king and queen?

  That night Pizhyot and his family dined at Dwan’s house. His daughters stared at Anand for a good, long while before they asked any questions. Once they did, they spoke in Britasyte which Pizhyot’s wife interpreted for Dwan and his family who mostly sat back and watched the encounter. The eldest daughter, Lasku, was of marrying age and wore a red skin paint that matched her baggy pants and top. Her sister, Valoha, had just reached womanhood and strangely, she painted her brown skin with brown paint and was one of the few in Dranveria who liked to wear green.